Hi, Kids:

Here is another of those newsletters I write from time to time to let you know how my writing is going. I'm actually writing to you from the Berkshire Hills in New England where the leaves are changing and the weather is growing cold. I've been up here all summer working on a new historical novel written all in letters. In it, a twelve year old Italian girl named Emma Bartoletti writes to President Franklin Roosevelt during the years of the Great Depression from 1933 to 1937. Emma lives in a mill town called North Adams and her parents both work in the textile mills. She tells President Roosevelt exactly what she thinks of the laws that help her family and the ones that don't. The Roosevelts actually received 5,000 letters a day during their time in the White House. I wonder if President Clinton gets 5,000 e-mails a day!

I've had a wonderful time writing this book and learning everything about the town of North Adams, the Italian immigrant experience, the Depression and President Roosevelt. That's one of the exciting things about writing a novel steeped in history. You get to go back and live in another time and place for a while. The book is one in a series called DEAR MR. PRESIDENT to be published by Winslow Press (www.winslowpress.com) and will be published in the Fall of 2001 with an accompanying website. There will be prompts on many of the pages of the novel which will encourage you to learn more about a particular subject by clicking on that page of the site.

I hope school is going well for all of you. Drop in on my website and leave me a message to tell me how you're doing. When I wasn't researching the Depression book, I spent my time reading the HARRY POTTER series and I take my hat off to J.K. Rowling. She really knows how to tell an exciting story and to extend it over four books, with three more to come. Somebody wrote me an e-mail and said they thought Ms. Rowling had copied some details out of my CASTLE books. There is a wizard named Alastor (Mad Eye Moody's real name in THE GOBLET OF FIRE) and there is a bad rat (Scabbers who turns into Wormtail in THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN) and there are other similarities. But as I thought about it, I realized that all of us writers pull from the same imaginative sources. Ms. Rowling and I may even have used some of the same research books to find names like Alastor. There are no new stories to be told in the world...only new ways to tell old stories. She has her own distinctive voice and I have mine. That's what's unique about each of us as writers -- and by that I mean each of you too.

Have a good fall.

Elizabeth Winthrop